Finally Friday

Oh the sights that summer gives us - double rainbow in our neighborhood

Tasty Tuesday

I don't know why, but I've been craving oysters - yes, this is the same girl who couldn't eat a raw oyster about two years ago. This tray is from Courtyard (full disclosure, I was really craving crawfish but the season is over) - but this weekend we got some canned oysters, and I baked them with breadcrumbs, jalapenos from the garden, and Parmesan cheese.Ooh, the jalapenos from the garden are super hot.

 

On our trip to Publix this weekend, we found Johnsonville cooked brats. Yes, they are super duper yummy! And, yes our healthy eating habits are going out the door for now. Well to some extent. This past week has been a bit of an adjustment - I had to cut back on the amount of time I spend in the kitchen when I get home from work. It's not that it takes me four hours to get dinner ready, it takes less than an hour, but the eating and cleaning are a few extra hours that at this point I cannot afford.
I was really happy when I decided to get 4 jumbo cans of Progresso soup when they were on sale last weekend. They have been my go to meals. I also made a large pot of spaghetti, with ground turkey and pasta sauce. Tom and I had enough for dinner and lunch, plus two frozen batches for two dinner for two later. On Sunday, I made a slow cooker chicken and rice casserole. That was dinner on Sunday, lunch on Monday. The rest has been aliquot in meal size portions. I am still very worried about leaving the slow cooker on all day while I'm away (fire risk), but I'm not afraid of cooking ginormous portions of food and making my own freezer meals. Maybe one day, the freezer will look like this http://www.southernliving.com/food/whats-for-supper/easy-freezer-meals-00400000009133/

When I spoke to Laura last I had suggested slow cooking her meals as a way to save time with the needy triplets. For her birthday, I got her the Fix it and Forget it 5 ingredients cookbook that Anne often refers to. Maybe I need to get one for me too.


Any ideas? Recipes? 

Crafts

The combination of exhilaration from our first publication (woot woot!) and atrocious, recurring migraines last Saturday had me in the house, with dim lighting, and intermittent naps.
Tom and I had been talking about football season coming up and I had said that I would be willing to make a football board.
So here it is: 20x30 board, with SEC college football and NFC teams - the teams have velcro on the back, so as we progress through the season, we have a fun way of keeping tabs on our teams progress. Some of the NFC teams got a slight name change by Tom. We are still trying to find a way to put the board up on the wall - the downfall of a rental unit.

I took that opportunity to take a few pictures of other crafts that have been completed. For a few weeks the coffee table in the living room had a 1000 piece puzzle in progress. Once completed, right before my trip to Newport, I wanted to frame it. Two trips to the framing store later, a mess with glue-ing the puzzle to the board, it was finally completed two weeks ago. The frame is currently on my bedroom floor, waiting for a way to hang it (common theme of this post).

Also, about 1.5 years ago, Tom got super upset at me. We were hanging out at his place, and I accidentally broke a frame. It wasn't just a frame. Ms. Laurie had framed his signed Brewers T-shirt. I apologized profusely, and said that I would fix it. Fast forward to now. It finally got framed again, and sits on his sports shelf in his bedroom. It is a big step for him to let me organize his bedroom, and we're getting there. My hopes are to get the pictures on that shelf framed in a collage.

 I also have been a terrible friend this summer. I didn't get Laura's birthday mailed until this week (about a month late) and Grace's graduation present is about 3 months late. I completely forgot Jennifer's birthday (about a week late) and will be making amends today, as I take a quick break and we get pedis. I hope that she will like her gifts.
Grace finished law school and is now in DC. She met us in Boston for a day and we had a lot of fun. I made her this framed art, from the Wordle website. You type in words and the words that appear the most are in bigger letters.

This is the previous T-shirt frame. I have to clean its back, it has either some kind of mildew or got some humidity damage. This will be for the next time I get inspired.

I heart Caribou Coffee

This image/logo is owned and copyrighted by Caribou Coffee

My kind of day starts with my favorite coffee (Caribou Coffee, I'm not paid for this statement). I love it so much, and I'm so grateful that Ms. Laurie introduced me to it when I was in La Crosse last year. Since it's not available in Birmingham, I try to ration the coffee that I had received for Xmas to make it last longer. Then, the most amazing thing happened two weeks ago. Publix had Caribou Coffee!!! I knew I had seen a $1 off coupon online for it, and tracked it down when I was free, just in time for Publix to release its new weekly sale. AND ANOTHER SURPRISE! Publix had it as a buy one, get one free. Normally priced at $8.99, I was able to get two packs for $6.99 after two $1 off coupons. I'm hoping that this coffee will follow the trend of most sales (comes around every 6-8 weeks).

Garden recap

In the garden, I did some rearranging last week to consolidate. The gladiolus never produced blooms so to the trash they went.The lettuce from seeds never progressed more than 4-5 leaves and they have been discarded as well. After our aphid problem earlier this year, I was very skeptical about our peppers (hence I haven't shared any of my plants this year :( ). I found Hannah's shop, it's about 20 minutes out of town, and remembered that they had neem oil. After two applications about 3 months ago, I haven't seen another aphid. Anyway, as of today, we have 9 jalapeno peppers on the plants, plus plenty more flowers. Tom and I have talked about making our own pickled jalapenos, or even some form of hot sauce. Maybe Xmas gifts? We have yet to try them out and see how hot they are. A mysterious plant (I lost the tag while transplanting) turned out to be bell pepper. We have a small pepper on that plant right now, and I'm watching it very closely. I still have a mysterious flowery plant, no flowers on it yet. We had our first marigold flowers. I'm trying to rehabilitate the marigolds that almost died while we were in Boston. The petunias were doing great, until my rearranging and some of them are not doing too well. I'm hoping that I can still save them. I'm watching the Zinia very closely and giving it some TLC. It has gone to almost dead to producing two flowers so far. I pruned the dahlias. After a few storms the top branches looked pretty beat up, and there were some new branches trying to push through at the bottom. Only time will tell how the plants will change over the next weeks.

Recap

After our huge shopping trip to Costco last month, we been eating mostly at home. We had stocked up on ground turkey, pork chops, chicken, stir fry veggies, pasta, and canned tomatoes. So there are so many possibilities, including taco pizza, with homemade crust, ground turkey, refried beans, peppers, olives, chiles, and cheese and Sweet and sour pork - first time I made this from scratch.

Taco pizza!

Taco pizza from the top

I made Scotcheroos this Thursday for Tom's lab meeting. It's a peanut butter rice krispies treat with a butterscotch chocolate topping. It is one of Tom's favorites and I found out about it while talking to his Aunt Kate in Boston. Ms. Laurie was nice to send me her recipe, and it turned out to be super yummy! I really liked that I had been given plenty of notice of the upcoming lab meeting, so I could wait for deals on the ingredients (even got gluten-free rice krispies on sale + coupon; we use crunchy/extra crunchy peanut butter, and I found a good deal on the creamy kind, while still keeping my brand loyalty). I was a bit worried because I had never cooked with corn syrup, but it all worked out.

Usually I don't get to taste lab treats, but we made an exception this time :)

We went to Matt and Melissa's wedding. Matt was a former lab mate of Tom's (they are also soccer buddies), and Melissa is currently in Tom's lab. Scottish Chris, who was staying with us for the wedding, wore his kilt. I also met Rob, who was a former postdoc/instructor in Tom's lab. It was a beautiful wedding and we had a great time.

Science has been going well for the most part, I'm nearly done with my second paper. The first paper was accepted, and I'm on track to graduate this semester.

I'm excited about football season starting! I can't wait to start cheering for my Tigers again, and having people over for Packers game. We are also playing with the idea of Football Sunday - grab the morning paper, and go to our favorite hangout, watch football, read, and drink.

I'm also excited about planning our trips this fall. Since the Packers are the current Superbowl champions, their ticket prices are super high, about 5x more than what they were last year. We have our eyes on the Falcons and the Panthers. We are also going to Orange Beach later in the fall for a wedding (I found a nice hat today on sale!), and I can't believe that I haven't been back to Louisiana for almost two years now! All of our traveling plans will of course depend on both of our progress with school.

Geaux Tigers!

Finally Friday

After talking to my friend Laura, I had an idea.
As a new mom to triplets, she barely has any time, even to cook (and she's an awesome cook). Part of the issue is keeping a stocked pantry.
So the idea:
Put a recipe book online.
The website would have a feature to allow you to plan your week or two weeks meals from the recipes in the book.
Another feature would be to generate a grocery list for that time (so if a recipe calls for 1 cup of rice, but you plan to make the recipe 4 times, you need to buy 4 cups of rice).
If you have a smartphone, create an app that lets you see your grocery list wherever you are. You could also use your phone to create your meal plans. If meal planning takes 30 minutes, but you don't have that time, you could save your progress (say five minutes worth of planning) and come back later.
For a fee, the website could offer to have someone buy the groceries for you and deliver it to your door.

The best idea for the book that needs to be in this format: slow cooker recipes (in the style of fix it and forget it).

I bet there's something like that out there but I haven't seen it.

Budgeting and so on

After our recent trip, I sat down with my bills, a calculator, pen and paper. Bottom line, a lot of money was spent.
For the past 7 weeks, I have been saving my coupons and looking for deals. Some weeks were better than others and the average savings was just shy of 32%. Yes, I saved money, and I don't think I will need shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, deodorant for a bit. It felt good to get these items when they were on sale + coupons. But I'm not the point of getting items for free, and therefore to me it seems as if I'm spending more than usual. Comfort will come in knowing that over the next few weeks, I won't need to buy these items.
This week was another stocking up but in a different sense. A trip to Costco to get frozen chicken, pork chops, wine, canned tomatoes, pasta, etc... It wasn't a cheap trip, but I have plenty to cook with for the next few weeks. Publix wasn't cheap either, but there isn't an easy way to save on fresh produce.
I also got my computer out, listed most of the ingredients in the kitchen, and came up with recipes and ideas for this week. I used a pack of ground turkey from Costco to make meatballs - some of which will be used for spaghetti dinner, and the rest will be frozen for a quick weeknight dinner.
So what now? I will keep on couponing, and wait for a deal that I can't pass up. I have about $10 ECB that I have to use at CVS by the end of the month. With the pantry, fridge, and freezer stocked up, the budget has been adjusted to $20 per week per person until the end of August.
Goals update:
Goal 4: Save money - I made my savings goal last month! Woo hoo! I now need to save for our friend's out of state wedding in October and keep building my emergency fund in case I don't find a job when I graduate.
Goal 5: Travel more - 18 states so far! Can't wait to figure out which football games we're going to this year, or the weather to cool down for an awesome backpacking trip.

Summer craft

Last Xmas, I received a new set of much needed baking trays. I had a shiny smaller tray that after a few rounds of cooking and dishwasher washing, had started rusting. Off it went to the craft pile for when I had something in mind. I first painted the tray with a few coats of black paint, then I remembered that Laurie had sent Tom a few newspapers from La Crosse with great shots of the Packers and thought of a way to use the pictures. I found some decoupage glue and sealer at Hobby Lobby and started on my craft.
Finished product:

My phone is just there for scale. This needs to finish drying and setting for a week or so. It may replace my very girly damask plate receptacle that is currently used to hold cell phones, keys, miscellaneous pocket items etc... Alternatively, since it is supposed to be water resistant, it could be used as a serving tray. We'll see - thank you Laurie for saving all the newspapers and sending them!

Week recap

The first week back to work after a being out of town is tough and goes by so quickly. 3 days worth of experiments failed late Friday evening, so my focus this weekend is to catch up on housework and write.
This week:
I actually started writing the thesis
Since I didn't get to celebrate 4th of July, we celebrated 14th of July - Bastille Day and pretended that the wine we drank was French - dry rubbed pork (Tom's work, was of course delicious), with broccoli, garlic mashed potatoes, and pineapple and roasted red pepper salsa
I found a new gardening buddy - it doesn't have a name
I helped Emily move in just about 3 hours - it was a great workout, prolly a week's worth! (just making excuses to not go to the gym, which incidentally I haven't been to all summer)
Looked at the budget, got groceries, and planned meals for the week ahead (look for another post)